At the end of the blessing Jocelyn kissed his cross, and began to speak to those assembled of the righteousness of the cause. The Pope’s letter was read aloud by one of the clerks, wherein the Pontiff blessed the sons of the Church. Jocelyn spoke eloquently, with burning words. A full pardon for all sins would be given to those who fought in the war. Those who died would be translated to heaven. The province of the Seven Streams was to be divided as spoil, and each common soldier was to have his share.
When this holy bribery had been made plain, Jocelyn diverged to schemes of his own. His tongue was clever enough to sustain the test, for it was the very boldness of his hypocrisy that had ensured men’s trust. He told the knights and nobles assembled before him how he had been blessed with a vision concerning the Crusade against the Seven Streams. The men listened with superstitious faith, for it was an age when Christendom had pledged its reason to the Church.
“My brothers,” he said, speaking with a loftiness that seemed to scorn deceit, “unworthy though I am of Heaven’s favour, I have been counselled strangely in a dream. St. Pelinore stood by me in the midst of the night, even as he has stood by me in the woods and the mountains. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘the Good God shines on the Golden Keys. He shall deliver the heretics into thy hands. First, thou shalt purge me an evil place, even Holy Guard set above the western sea. With shame I speak it—the nuns are wantons, its Abbess a witch. First destroy Holy Guard, then shall God deliver unto you the province of the Seven Streams.’ ”
The man’s hypocrisy kept pace with his theme, and none would have suspected the baser passions that worked beneath. Jocelyn’s eyes flashed as he spoke, his face was transfigured as by some heavenly purpose. The vision served him that night with the assembled barons, for who so impious that he should deny the saint who had pointed out Holy Guard as doomed to ruin? It was agreed among them before they dispersed that they should march on Holy Guard as St. Pelinore had said.
CHAPTER XXVII
Holy Guard towered on its great headland as on an island, fronting the surges of the sea. The abbey held the last outjutting of the coast on the side of the province of the Seven Streams. To the south, washing the inner surface of the cliff, the great Gloire came flowing fast, filling the deep craggy valley from shore to shore, swirling under the thousand shadows of its ancient trees.
Holy Guard, piled height on height on its lofty rock, looked over the river mouth where it met the sea. At low tide the headland was surrounded with sands, great golden lawns where purple cloud-shadows raced and played. Beyond were the white-edged breakers and the silvery azure of the sea. Myrtles mantled the rock even to where the spray might fall. From the cliffs and the wild marshes east of Holy Guard the hills rose up, sombre with black oak, pine, and yew. Southwards in clean weather could be seen the peaks of the great White Mountains that parted the Crescent from the Christian Cross.
Holy Guard—black, desolate, and mysterious—had received Rosamunde within its walls. The place was as rugged as the rocks beneath, swept by the sea wind, bleached by the spray. Its gold cross on the chapel spire seemed to glitter over a savage void poised betwixt the clouds and the wild depths beneath. Chasm and valley plunged to the waters. The great forests rolled to mimic the sea.
The Abbess Joan was an austere woman and pitiless, hard of feature as a granite image. She had suffered much in her early youth, had grown the more bitter amid cloistered gloom. The nuns of Holy Guard were grey and rough, shackled by a discipline that coarsened the soul. For them no orchards bloomed, no broad valleys were gilded with easy corn. No music, rich and deep, wreathed round pillar and under painted vault garlands of song and of sacred sound. Holy Guard was dumb, solemn, and saturnine. Its life was as death, its joy worse than sorrow.
As for Rosamunde, full of a passionate misery, she had entered its gate dreaming of chants and the throbbing of bells. She had pictured cloisters full of golden light, gardens where angels might have tended the flowers. Her heart was heavy, yearning for peace, and that infinite calm the world had not given.